Volume 2 No 2 (2008)
Found Object, Sampling: Re-appropriating Process towards Open Source Architecture
Farid Rakun
Sampling: the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or element of a new recording. This is typically done with a sampler, which can be a piece of hardware or a computer program on a digital computer.
Found object: the use of an object which has not been designed for an artistic purpose, but which exists for another purpose already. Found objects may exist either as utilitarian, manufactured items, or things (including, at times, dead bodies) which occur in nature. In both cases the objects are discovered by the artist or musician to be capable of being employed in an artistic way, and are designated as "found" to distinguish them from purposely created items used in the art forms.
Appropriation: the use of borrowed elements in the creation of new work. The borrowed elements may include images, forms or styles from art history or from popular culture, or materials and techniques from non-art contexts… The new work does not actually alter the original per se; the new work uses the original to create a new work. In most cases the original remains accessible as the original, without change.
Openness: a philosophy that is being used as the basis of how various groups and organizations operate. It is a relatively new term to describe this general way of doing things… It is typified by communal management, and open access to the information or material resources needed for projects; openness to contributions from a diverse range of users/producers/contributors, flat hierarchies, and a fluid organisational structure.
Open source: a set of principles and practices on how to write software, the most important of which is that the source code is openly available… one should not only get the source code but also have the right to use it.
Open system: a state of a system, in which a system continuously interacts with its environment. Open systems are those that maintain their state and exhibit the characteristics of openness previously mentioned. [1]
Architecture, after the World War II, has failed to deliver its many promises.
One of the main causes is its preference to harmonise its relationship with the
industry over relating more with the progressive community as its people, its
user, and its audience. As a consequence, whenever the word architecture is mentioned
in this essay, it refers to architecture as an industry instead of a discipline.
As an industry, it’s only intuitive for architecture to follow the current global
industrial trend: homogenising, campaigning consumerism as its core reasoning,
and supporting the global development to make this world a visually saturated
and intellectually dulled place to be. Furthermore, concentrating at the aforementioned
condition, this essay focuses mainly on finding a strategy to subvert this very
architectural condition, to discover the undelivered promises, but in the way
also finding better way, more democratised way to do architecture.
The similar critical view has been adopted in many fields, such as music, visual art in its many forms, graphic and industrial design, and computer graphics, to name a few. The result and embodiment of this view has varied in the respective fields, but it is fair to say that it has been responsible for bold actions that revolutionise the whole industry. This essay will discuss some examples, whether closely related to architectural discourse or not, found on the World Wide Web, to be used to push a more critical view towards architecture, a process not unlike found objects in art where a subjective appropriation holds the key to the whole understanding. The examples provided here are not randomly taken [although quite randomly discovered]. Some thinking concepts are being used as parameters in choosing them. The concepts mentioned in the beginning of this essay will be used both as logics and analogies.
Intellectually speaking, it is important to mention early that this essay would concentrate not towards a reduced form of architecture as a diagram that trying to reach an ideal state where infinity of variations could be reached [take Deleuze’s folded space for example], but instead towards the Bernard Cache’s definition of architecture as an embodiment of the technological object, where industrial automation or serial machineries replaced stamped forms [2]. Both understanding considers architectural process as a non-conclusive continuous process, but when the former put its interest in spatial mould as a frame, a skin as a result; the later was more into a temporal modulation in which matter was seen as a consequence of formal process. It’s fair to conclude that the first is about abstraction of enclosure, where the second is about the process of discovering consequences of an idea. Materiality holds more vitality in the later, therefore forming a reason for the aforementioned preference.
Pallalink: found object + sampling
Palla, the nickname of Kazuhiko Kawahara, trained and worked as an architect for ten years before he decided to become an artist photographing architecture and built environments surrounding him. Not being easily satisfied, he manipulates the photographs so that something hidden is revealed, as if it has been waiting there from to be discovered from the beginning. Palla started his weblog Pallalink.net in 2002 where he posts his pictures, layers and shifts them under the influence of his online audience’s comments, opening himself and his works to the possibilities the WWW holds.
He based the transformation of his works on people comments and their thoughts, while he acts as the actor of his audience direction, recreating and transforming those pictures. By doing that, he aims to break the paradigm of artist as a predomination of an artwork finished result, ‘The concept of my present work is ‘found’. I don’t know what the purpose of this work is, but by continuing the process I know that I will always “find” something amazing.’ Further, he’d like to think about it as if, ‘Pallalink.net – said domain on the internet – an ‘artist’ itself’ [3].
Technically, he uses several underlying concepts, each with its own agenda:
Symmetry: This act of the disassembling occurs through the manipulation
which forces to cohere each different space in itself. It is the correction for
a preestablished harmony of the homogenization. It seems that the corrected spaces
can uninterruptedly be connected seamlessly. It is no longer possible that you
bring up in your consciousness about how strange the place is, because you are
already woven as a particle of the place.
Reflection: Images, which are generated by those manipulations, contain a metaphor
that is hidden description for various events; the spectrum of the lost boundary
area.
Shearing: Once rivalry balanced forces slide the phase to another, they are beginning
to lose its balance. The space where lost the balance, is gradually twisted, and
draws a spiral and converges on center of gravity or diffuses outside. The perspective,
which is identified as the entire basis, at last has brought cracks by those motions,
and broken up. Minuscule amounts of differences can cause the world breakup where
is dominated by perspective. Therefore it is the proof that all things are incomplete.
Circulation: Twisting does not bring a distortion of the space, but brings a stability
of the circulation of the unexpected connection. The space, which draws the line
of a Mobius strip, makes possible to come and go between the surface and the other
side of the space as long as that orbital motion continues. When you discover
the world as spaces circulated between the surface and the other side, a new perspective
is found by the interpretation of the space as topology that is free from the
grid system.
Difference: Exploration of conjunction points in your subconscious. The conjunction
could courses an ambivalent feeling of your nurtured sense. This simulated perspective
occasionally provides an intensive and incompatible feeling to you. That is reason
why you can discover nothing but a thing to be called the architecture in there,
when you once become aware of the generated space as the environment as the result
of these manipulation. [4]
Figure 1. Excerpt from 'Found' and 'Creatures of the Cities' book series, showing the original
images and altered ones
Figure 2. Palla's work
What he does is very architectural in its core, creating intervention in a
given banal space, so a different and, sometimes, transcendental dimension comes
out from it. He tries to understand a ‘genius loci’, and in his intervening process
asks its user, its audience, for their input. Even if anyone chooses to categorise
what he does to a different realm than the conventional built architecture, it
still functions well analogy. Isn’t the way he does things a very interesting
concept to be applied into conventional everyday practice of architecture?
By making it symmetrical I confront the natural with the mechanical, the
artificial. Architecture in itself is made entirely by people to be used and controlled
by people. It is artificial. However, when people come and gather, it becomes
like a city, a living organism and the situation transforms into something more
natural. My works contain both those artificial and natural components. I’m attracted
by the dynamism of the change from a simple form to a complicated organism.
Kazuhiko Kawahara, in an interview with Uleshka [5]
Lot-Ek’s Bohen Foundation & Morton Loft project: found object + appropriation
Lot-Ek, an architectural design firm based in New York, is well known for their works which reuse industrial mass objects for their spatial properties. It is clear that the concept of appropriation has been mined relentlessly, if not tirelessly, as a defining element from the beginning of every project’s development. They have created a strong cored proposal based on the concept for programs such as mass housing schemes, temporary urban pavilions, even high-rises.
For Bohen Foundation [NY, 2002], they created a setting in which eight shipping containers, containing all the permanent activities and at the same time functioning as a movable enclosure. It was created to house a program in which maximum spatial flexibility was needed, a consequence of the multi-scaled media exhibition the foundation was intended to support [6].
Figure 3. Bohen Foundation project
The shipping containers as a movable enclosure and their rigidly-preset tracks
In the Morton Loft refurbishment project [NY, 2000] they appropriated a trailer
tank to encapsulate private areas within the apartment. It was cut in two sections
and was put in a certain way so that they define the remaining space as effectively
as they house the programs within: two sleeping pods for the horizontal section
and two bathrooms stacked on top of each other for the vertical one. The intervention
act was not only leaving the surrounding space of the left undisturbed, but also
clearly defining the circulation area [7].
Figure 4. Morton Loft project
The cut trailer tank as a defining space and circulation elements
As we have seen from these two projects, an appropriation of a found object
is not a new concept to be applied spatially, therefore architecturally. The remaining
question is the possibility the similar concept holds when it is being applied
on different settings and different context; would it be embodied the same way
as Lot-Ek had done if the project was in Beijing? Would the project be done in
similar logic if it is being done in pre-industrial machinic era? In answering
that question maybe an analogy should be made, isn’t ‘Hurt’ still a non-arguably
great song, either in the form of Johnny Cash’s cover, or in its original Nine
Inch Nails version. Or maybe it is a question of the singers, not the song?
Haque, Adam Somlai-Fischer/Aether Architecture, and the Reorient Team’s Reconfigurable House project : open source + open system
Architecture as software, the phrase stand so well with this project [Tokyo and Belgium, 2008]: an embodiment of open source architectural system in the form of an environment constructed from thousands of low tech components that can be ‘reconfigured’ by its occupants [8]. It asks the important question whether the term ‘interactive’ applied popularly these days stays true to its meaning, or is it actually ‘reactive’? [9] The project also challenged the computing ‘smart homes’, which can be seen as invisible technology application to prevent DIY to a certain extent. Unlike those homes, which homogenised users in their deterministic view over language, dialogue and interaction, Reconfigurable House fostered and highlighted the importance of different behaviours as a result of different logics each human being has. Its sensors and actuators can be reconnected endlessly so the environment, the structure, evolves as the people, the culture, changed their preference and behaviour. The project blatantly expressed the creators’ preference towards user [they prefer to call him/her ‘participant’] as the determining factor of an environment over designers of the system.
Figure 5. The Reconfigurable House on display in NTT ICC Tokyo and Z33 Belgium (2008)
Further, analogously speaking, it could be seen as an example of architecture as operating system. In the word of Usman Haque, a spatial researcher and artist who is co-responsible for the project, “One model of operating system that is particularly relevant to architecture (since the design of space is always a collaborative process) is an open source system” [10]. He got into the statement by seeing architecture as a combination of hardware [solid and static elements such as walls, floors, and roofs] and software [ephemeral elements, such as sounds and smells], in order to structuralise his argument against traditional practice of architecture which much too often concerns itself only with its hardware elements. It is very important to highlight the reasoning behind such view, as an embodiment of some kind of faith towards democracy in spatial design realm: “… applying open source to architecture suggests a collaborative democratic project that exists in time as well as space: an architecture that is created by people through its use, as a performance, a conversation, a bodystorm that goes on throughout the life of the architectural system, whether it is a building or other architectural situation” [11].
This house also demonstrated how open source architectural system is possible to be reached in a software term as well as a hardware term. Elements like the Cat Brick Wall, Mist Laser garden, Monkey Corridor and Radio Penguin Ceiling, which actually low tech toys and gadgets, showed that the structure can be inexpensively recreated by even those who are not experts neither in electronics, nor buildings.
Figure 5. Squirrel net wall, mood handle, mobile phone
Some of the Reconfigurable House's lo-tech elements
For those who are interested to apply open system in their architectural thinking development, there are a few more things that can be learned from the artists. The first is several key features to open source architecture [12]:
Designer participants.
A control system that one allows oneself to be part of in order to expand that structure.
Choreographies of openness.
Re-appropriation.
Capacity for sharing design problems.
The second is the two distinct steps open source architecture requires: the infrastructure development that enable ‘non-professional’ designers to participate more closely in design and construction process, and the knowledge application of space design to the formulation of a framework within which other people can consciously design spaces.
Forays’ Cocoon project: open source + found object
Forays are Adam Bobette and Geraldine Juarez. Their projects are well known for their courageous quality in experimentation, subversiveness and critical point of view. Essential in forming the purpose of their artistic works are vital questions about cultural hegemony such as public space, exchange and consumption modes [13]. In a project supported by Eyebeam Foundation in New York, they developed the cocoon, a critical structure towards mystified architecture, towards the notion of economy which based itself on never ending consumption cycle, towards uber privatisation of urban spaces and monopolised resources. It started as a portable shelter initially built to study tree canopies and how the geometry of leaves interacts with light. It was built using free postal envelopes, discarded plastic beach blankets and construction netting. They found that it was an ideal resting place: lightweight, portable and easy to build, as it can be set most anywhere one can wrap around: an open source structure system.
In its development, the cocoon has been mounted in New York, and Montreal, for introducing the concept of squatting to general masses in a time of excessively inflated rental prices, as well as tree sits to protect community gardens on the brink of destruction by the city officials. As a tactical occupation of space, this simple design, not unlike a hammock, introduces to us a notion of the kind of open source architecture in the most extremely literal sense: a dwelling space which is easy to assemble, cheap, accessible, portable, comfortable, compelled by the ethics of open source, hacking, larceny, alternative forms of exchange and consciously low-tech in order to be popular and widespread as much as possible. The structure produced, seen as the embodiment of the subversive idea, is not the goal in itself. It recognises the poetry and elegance of the architectonic knots, folds, and weight this free and cheap material potentially holds, but the vitality of this project is actually in the networks of exchange one encounters in the process: the human exchange which may have been otherwise foreclosed by dominant modes of exchange and consumption.
Figure 6. The Cocoon project's diagram showing articulations, techniques and definition of terms
Source: http://forays.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/fieldnotes2.pdf
The cocoon is an experiment in open source architecture… an attempt at a demystified architecture… an accessible architecture… an architecture that could push our notions of inhabitation by taking us to sleep in scaffolds, in parks owned by the city, under bridges, in the metal and concrete canopies of the city. The cocoon is meant to save essential spaces from destruction by squatting… the cocoon is meant to be given away… the cocoon is not really even an object so much as a composition of relations and potentials… [14]
Forays suggest you to make your own cocoons to meet your own environmental background, purpose and settings. It could be made with anything you found laying around in your respective area. This found object conceptually limitless, but Forays provide us with some guidelines mentioned before. Essentially, a cocoon should work well enough to be taken up in different situations and engender more articulations. Forays asked you to participate, engage in the discussion and collectively take part in hacking of resources and physical urban infrastructure, in order to add a little more to the grass roots architecture movement. One small step at a time.
This is a very strong conceptual project, using underlying simple concepts such as found object and open source system. The simplicity do nothing except strengthen the impact of this project, reminding us how spatial possibilities have not been undermined and understood fully by architecture, as an ideal, cultural, and political embodiment of human beings. In general, the real questions and problems our community faces nowadays, have not been raised, let alone answered by architects. Architecture has failed to be critical towards human relation, exchange and interaction. The fundamental capitalistic form is still being held as the most popular parameters in the practice of the discipline. Maybe it is time to tell ourselves that whenever we still value an architectural project mainly by its physical scale, tangible built details and the worst of them all, how much it is worth, we still hold undeniable proof that we are still, indeed, a part of the predictable status quo, without any real voice having the ability to surprise the world: simply unworthy for anyone to hear.
The cocoon is an object in a transitional state. It is a space of incubation and an open unfolding. We know there will be a butterfly, but when? What will it look like? We have recourse to continuities, to habits and repetitions, we know generalities about butterflies, but we also, equally, don’t know what its life course will be, what singularities will interrupt its generalities. [15]
Figure 7. The Cocoon project in context; folds + unfolds
As all the examples shown above exhibit, by using ages-old artistic concepts such as sampling, found object, and appropriation, open system architecture in a form of open source structure is not an unforeseeable dream anymore. A state of architecture where space, object, and user interact, relate, and communicate by exchanging information can be seen as an ideal bottom up state. It is an answer for the discipline’s need, after its being ruled by linear deterministic fundamentally humanist top down progress for nearly four centuries, since industrial revolution took place in the 18th century. The open source architectural system idea brought forward here is not relatively new, in fact projects using very similar theme are being run around the world [16]. Learning from Open Source Architecture for Africa, which ventures the open system idea by taking the same path as Wikipedia, using software development in order to let its potential users’ exchange know-hows, there are additional key lessons learned regarding the success of open source software development worth mentioning here [17]:
version control is necessary
form collaborative virtual teams with a variety of skills and skill level
gatekeeper plays a vital role in quality management [a role definitely for architects in open source architecture]
peer review is a powerful means of quality assurance
user feedback is essential
development is a cyclical process
As a conclusion, I would like to point out the importance of further architectural studies towards the process of sampling, appropriation, and open source system, as well as their relationship with architecture. Another substantial matter is pursuing the possibilities to adapt them to the discipline’s practical realm. The purpose of this act is not to produce students, scholars, and/or practitioners that endlessly make mediocre copies of the geniuses’ pieces. Quite the contrary; it aims for a certain state of consciousness about originality, and asking the right questions towards the present condition of the practice. Another important thing that we can learn here is that intentional imitation, introduced by concepts such as found object, always functions better than concealed plagiarism.
Lastly, I’d like to point on some facts that could function as an ending: photography survives the invention of digital compact cameras and www.flickr.com. Film survives the invention of DV8 and www.youtube.com. Real social relation and web design doesn’t suffer from the invention of www.friendster.com, www.myspace.com, www.facebook.com, etc., where one not only could foster his/her relationships without any location constraint, but also recreates one’s self-imagery by customising his/her own web interface design. Instead of suffering a slow and painful death, the very industries backing up those fields flourished with new possibilities, and are busy exploring new boundaries. Architecture, its very difference with the mentioned fields above is its unself-containedness, faces the question whether or not the same case could be happening? Architecture is neither the act of building, nor the act of drawing. It’s the discipline that concerns itself with anything that has to do with the built environment, as a cultural act. Architects should not put their concentration only in perfecting their techniques of drawing and building, but also continuously train themselves to think in order to address issues and problems this world imposed upon them. By doing so a deeper and better understanding on how to further act and actually stage a natural human intervention in its very essence would hopefully be more achievable. Maybe that way we could find a way to survive this inevitable industrial revolution, and put our energy on more constructive things, instead of constantly worrying about what the future holds for the survival of our profession and discipline.
‘Most advanced spatial interaction research is these days produced by non-architects… These developments throw into question the very role of designers, because such user- and environmentally-responsive mechanisms allow people themselves to take prime position in configuring (that is, designing) their own spaces. … In enhanced environment design, where traditional architecture and virtual systems unite, users can be the designers of their own spaces — … these "open source" spaces. … However, while virtual system design has often tended to emphasize efficiency, convenience, punctuality and predictability, architecture, on the other hand, can give clues about ways to develop spatial poetries. … Virtual environment design, through the focus of an architecture-as-software approach, encourages us instead to find our own logics and leads us away from designing for verisimilitude and towards designing for abstraction. … As people become architects of their own spaces (through use of such spaces) the word "architecture" ceases to be a noun: instead it becomes a verb. Such an architecture is explicitly dynamic, a shift that opens up a wealth of poetic possibilities for designers of space.’ [18]
References
[1] All from Wikipedia, 5 April 2008.
[2] I owe the understanding stated on the paragraph to Sophia Vyzofiti’s essay Folding Architecture, Concise Genealogy of the Practice, in Vyzofiti (2007). Folding Architecture: spatial, structural, and organizational diagrams. Singapore: Page One, pp. 130-43.
[3] Uleshka’s interview with Palla in Pallalink – twisted symmetry photographs, Ping Mag Online Magazine, 21 December 2006, http://pingmag.jp/2006/12/21/pallalink-twisted-symmetrie-photographs-2/
[4] Pallalink. http://pallalink.net/gallery/
[5] Pallalink – twisted symmetry photographs, http://pingmag.jp/2006/12/21/pallalink-twisted-symmetrie-photographs-2/
[6] All information contained about this project were retrieved from http://www.lot-ek.com
[7] All information contained about this project were retrieved from http://www.lot-ek.com
[8] Otherwise noted, all information contained about this project were retrieved from http://www.haque.co.uk/reconfigurablehouse.php and http://house.propositions.org.uk
[9] Usman Haque (2006). Architecture, interaction, systems. AU: Arquitetura & Urbanismo, 149 August 2006, http://www.haque.co.uk/papers/ArchInterSys.pdf
[10] Usman Haque (2004). The choreography of sensations: Three case studies of responsive environment interfaces. VSMM 2004 Conference Proceedings, Hybrid Realities & Digital Partners, http://www.haque.co.uk/papers/choreography-of-sensations.pdf
[11] Usman Haque (2002). Hardspace, softspace and the possibilities of open source architecture, http://www.haque.co.uk/papers/hardsp-softsp-open-so-arch.pdf
[12] Usman Haque (2002). Hardspace, softspace and the possibilities of open source architecture, http://www.haque.co.uk/papers/hardsp-softsp-open-so-arch.pdf
[13] All information contained about this project were retrieved from http://forays.org/?cat=3
[14] Forays (2007). Forays into cocoons: Field notes, http://forays.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/fieldnotes1.pdf
[15] Forays (2007). Forays into cocoons: Field notes, http://forays.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/fieldnotes1.pdf
[16] See Open Source Architecture For Africa [OSAFA], currently under its ‘seeding phase’ – the first six months in which the initiators of the project have to contribute content all on their own, all the while contacting stakeholders to convince them about the concept, and documenting their projects - as one of the best example for the case in my opinion.
[17] Derek Keats (2003). Collaborative development of open content: A process model to unlock the potential for African universities. First Monday, 8 (2), http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_2/keats/index.html, via Helge Fahrnberger, Open source architecture for Africa - A bottom-up approach to innovation building in the context of construction in rural Africa, http://www.osafa.org/english/images/8/85/Osafa-IST.pdf
[18] Usman Haque (2004). The choreography of sensations: Three case studies of responsive environment interfaces. VSMM 2004 Conference Proceedings, Hybrid Realities & Digital Partners, http://www.haque.co.uk/papers/choreography-of-sensations.pdf